by Neil Bullock
“Why not? I created my first planet quite by accident, but I’ve refined my understanding since then. You should see it, Eden. Watching a planet coming to life... It’s incredible.”
I can only shake my head.
Lara asks, “I was right, wasn’t I? When I said you picked Eden and me because of our fathers? And you picked Kyle because of his daughter?”
“All of that may be factually accurate, but none of it matters! You’re not real! I made you. You exist because of me.”
“We still exist!” Lara shouts. “We’re still human!”
Mitch’s smile remains in place and he simply shakes his head. It makes me want to go over there and punch his teeth in. The only thing that stops me is that I don’t know how Kyle fits into this situation. Would he stop me? Would he help me? His glazed-over eyes make me hope he would just stand there and do nothing, but hope is a dangerous thing.
I take a deep breath. “So, what was your plan? You wanted us to kill Kyle, right? So that you’d have some entertainment? Like people killing each other in front of you is no different from watching the fucking television. You didn’t expect we’d befriend him.”
“No, I admit my predilections have caused me to underestimate certain emotions.”
He says it like it’s normal. Not for the first time, I wonder how I ever saw any good in him at all. “Your predilections have… how many Earths have you made?”
“Oh, dozens. It took a long time to get the parameters right. It’s not just Earth, either—”
I cut him off. “And those people are still out there?”
“For the most part, yes. Where you came from is a slightly different matter.” He smirks.
“Jesus,” I say, because I can’t understand any of this. I can’t understand why he thinks this is okay. He’s created dozens of Earths, is responsible for the creation of tens of billions of lives, and yet all I can think is that maybe, somehow, something on this train will let me create a replica of my world and live on it. As much as I want to kill Mitch where he stands, I also recognize that he is my best hope of seeing my family again. They may not be my actual family, but it sounds like it might be possible to come close. Maybe even close enough that I can’t tell the difference.
“Wait. You said you based these worlds on the real Earth?” Lara asks, and she sounds completely calm. “Does that mean each one of them has a version of us?”
Mitch tilts his head slightly. “No, no, no. It’s not like that. I only created the worlds and set some basic parameters. They developed organically, though usually along the same lines. There’s a version of Earth that has such a weak magnetic field that most consumer electronics are impossible. Solar flares, you see. Another is further away from its sun and much colder. It’s interesting the kinds of people those places produce. You had it easy. I will admit that I followed your lives, though. Maybe I saw opportunities to… alter your trajectories.”
“Like when you killed billions of people and left only me alive?”
“Quite. That wasn’t something I’d tried before. There were glitches. Alice and Greg, for example. They weren’t supposed to survive. But I admit, I wanted to see how you’d handle it. Adversity of that magnitude tends to change people, which makes for more interesting… guests.”
I make a frustrated sound that he doesn’t seem to hear. Lara asks, “Did you create whole solar systems for these new planets?” It makes me realize I’ve only scratched the surface of the horror.
“It started that way, but I realized it won’t make any difference to the little people. They just need a sun in the right approximate place, so I started placing the planets around existing stars. It will certainly be interesting when technology advances sufficiently for one Earth to find one of others. That’ll be a head scratcher!” He laughs that same laugh I heard on my first day here. The one that I thought pegged him as a pleasant, jolly man, but he’s discussing this as if it’s purely theoretical, not something he’s done. Like he hasn’t created billions of lives just so he can toy with them.
“So, you altered our trajectories,” Lara says. “Does that mean you made my father the way he was?” Her words steal the air from the lungs as I wonder what else he might have done to us. We’re just toys to Mitch. Everything I achieved, everything Lara achieved is just background noise to the purpose Mitch had planned for us. I shake my head to clear it. No, I’ve been down that path before. I used to believe that because my father only valued me for the money that I could provide to him, willingly or otherwise, or the situations I could bail him out of, I had no intrinsic worth of my own. It wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now. He was just an asshole. Mitch may have technically created us, but we’re still better than him.
“Actually, no,” Mitch says. “Have you ever studied humans? They’re terrible. They get off on hurting one another. Your fathers may be why I was interested in you, but I didn’t make them the way they were. Listen, as much as I enjoy discussing my train’s abilities, I think I can count this experiment as having failed.”
My eyes flick to Kyle. He doesn’t seem to have registered anything that has been said.
“What about Kyle?” I ask. “You exposed him to the outside to make him violent?”
“Something like that. It seems to have different effects on different people, so I wasn’t sure it would work. It hasn’t done exactly what I hoped. With Rona, it was very different. She withdrew into herself and gradually lost her mind. You should see what she spends most of her time doing now. She sits in her room painting the outside. It’s awful to look at, truly.”
I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach again. Even people he claims as friends aren’t safe from his depravity. “You exposed Rona to it?”
“I did. She had different ideas about how the train should be used.”
“She showed you how to use the train and that’s how you thanked her?” Lara asks.
Mitch shifts his gaze to her, apparently disinterested in her tone of anguish. “I thanked her by saying thank you. This was a separate matter.”
“Right, of course. Silly me,” she says. I want to warn her not to provoke him too much. I don’t know what he’s going to do with us now that he’s found us in the locomotive, but I can’t imagine it’ll be good. It’s likely that our lives are over, and with Kyle on his side, there’s nothing we can do about it.
“So how does it all work?” I ask, obviously stalling for time, but hoping he won’t be able to resist talking about his great and terrible toy.
“It’s quite simple, really. The locomotive contains most of the basic controls. On, off, forward, backward, that kind of thing. It also keeps records of every place the train has been, every action that it has carried out. There’s a kind of universe explorer in that system,” he says, pointing at the screen we were using, “It lets you see everything that’s out there. You can set the route in there too. At the rear of the train is where creation, destruction and alteration of the physical world is controlled. In the middle of the train is where small matter is created. Chairs, tables, that kind of thing.”
“You redecorated the front half of the train, right?” I ask.
“Yes. That black color scheme is unflattering. I much prefer the red and gold.”
A flash of desperation causes me to try to be friendly. “Me, too.”
He nods, as if he hasn’t been trying to systematically destroy my life. I glance around, searching for the chair leg. I see it leaning up against the wall just inside the locomotive, just to Lara’s right.
“What does the colored line on the outside of the train mean?” Lara asks.
“Kyle guessed correctly. It’s the current location. I assigned colors to places so I can keep track. White is the version of Earth Eden comes from, orange is where Lara is from, and so on.”
I feel like when we run out of things to say, he will take us and throw us after Lara’s father, so I quickly ask, “What about my dream? You sent
me that dream of the train?”
Mitch hesitates, then stares at me. “I… no. I haven’t been able to figure that one out. I thought you were lying when I first met you, but then you told the others the same thing and apparently haven’t strayed from that story. You really dreamed of the train?”
“I did. And the line on the outside was white. That’s a color you picked.”
He scratches his chin. “That is a concern, I have to admit. One I should probably resolve. Kyle, grab Eden, I will bring Lara. It’s time to go, ladies.”
“No!” Lara shouts immediately. She grabs the chair leg, raises it above her head and runs at Mitch. I almost think she’s going to make it, but Kyle bends and lifts her off the ground before she’s in range of Mitch. She struggles and cries out, then Kyle grabs her wrist and twists, and the chair leg clatters to the floor. I swear I hear bones snap. Lara’s scream of pain is like nothing I’ve ever heard, so violent and so full of betrayal that I’m surprised she doesn’t damage her vocal cords. I fight to stay silent and I don’t try to move. What would be the point? We’re on a train, there’s nowhere we can go that we can be safe. I choke back the tears that threaten to come. I don’t want to give Mitch the satisfaction of seeing me cry. When I hear Lara whimpering, though, I can’t help it.
“Kyle!” Lara pleads, her voice shrill and uncontrolled. “You don’t have to do this. Please!” Nobody replies. I try to catch her eye, but she doesn’t look my way. Kyle hands her over to Mitch then comes for me. I hold out my hand for him to take, and, gently, he does. We’re marched out of the locomotive.
twenty-eight
The Truth
When Mitch marches us right through the first carriage, I start to hope that our fate isn’t what I assumed. I am fully expecting to be thrown from the train into the amorphous horror outside. He walks us past my room and through the dining car. We trudge past Mitch’s room, through the storage car, then through the small matter creator. Lara’s sobbing is getting louder the farther we go. I want to reach out to her, but Mitch has her by both shoulders, making her walk ahead of him. It hurts me physically that I can’t offer any kind of comfort, and even if I could, I doubt I could make it convincing. She’s a smart kid, she knows this is the end of the line just as much as I do.
Finally, Mitch comes to a halt in the rear vestibule of carriage nine. This is where we got off the train to head to carriage eleven for the first time, and I briefly wonder if there’s anything to that rather than mere coincidence. Is Mitch trying to communicate something? If he throws us out, will we be able to get back on in carriage eleven?
Mitch turns to address me. “I’m sorry, Eden. I truly did believe your name was perfect. It’s a shame you weren’t.”
I can’t help the bitter laugh that escapes me, nor the sudden and unstoppable tears that follow. I bite down hard on my tongue to stop them. I shake my head, trying to communicate my disgust for everything that Mitch is. “So, now what?”
“I’m afraid this is where you get off.”
Lara tries to back up, but Mitch yanks on her broken arm, causing her to scream again. I feel it as a primal urge to move, to charge forward, to seize her from the grip of her captor.
“Let me go!” she howls. I try to catch her eye, but she’s too terrified. Where is my fire? Where is my determination to do something, anything? I can’t bring myself to fight this, despite the anger that’s on a slow burn deep in the pit of my stomach. My eyes dart around, looking for absolutely anything that might help. They land on Kyle, who has said nothing since Mitch found us in the locomotive. He’s just staring straight ahead. What did Mitch do to him? Is it something that can be undone?
I turn and, trying to keep the pleading note out of my voice, I say, “Kyle, Mitch is going to turn you into the man you were in prison for being, a man you never were! Are you going to let him do that to you? Is that what you want?” There’s no reaction.
“Kyle, you have to be in there!” I try. “You don’t want it to end like this. You don’t want our blood on your hands.”
His gaze flicks down to me for an instant, but then flicks away again. It feels dismissive. I’m suddenly sure that’s all the time we have. It’s game over. There’s nothing more I can do.
The fact that Lara’s father didn’t suffocate as he clung to the train while we flew through the grayspace suggests that, by itself, the outside isn’t lethal. It isn’t like space. We might live among the ghosts until we starve. Or we might live forever out there, lost. At least Lara and I would have each other, but honestly, that’s not much of a consolation considering our minds might unravel out there.
Mitch has finished struggling with Lara and now holds her in front of him, his forearm around her neck. “Kyle! Open the door!”
Kyle pulls me forward to the door controls. I could maybe push him out as soon as they open, but he’s holding on tightly to me and I’d only go with him. Lara would be next. There’s no point. Kyle presses the open button and the door slides silently open. Those tendrils of gray waste no time in gripping the door frame and soon they begin to flail around just inside.
Kyle gasps, but he looks just as vacant as before when I turn and glance at him.
“Please,” I beg. “You don’t have to do this!”
“Eden!” Lara cries. Mitch is advancing toward the door, pushing her as he goes. I’m torn between not wanting to watch and…
“Wait!” I shout. “Me first. Put me out first.” I don’t want Lara to see me disappear into the gray, but if I have any control over myself once I’m out there, I’m going to do everything in my power to pretend it’s not as bad as it undoubtedly is. Anything I can do to ease her fear, just a little bit.
“As you wish,” Mitch says and steps aside, taking Lara with him. She’s sobbing and gasping and makes the briefest eye contact as Mitch readjusts his grip on her. I very nearly lash out at him as Kyle maneuvers me closer to the threshold between this life and whatever comes after.
Then I’m standing on the edge. The gray tendrils snake around my feet and ankles then pull back, tasting me, not knowing what to make of me. I think about everything I’ll never get to do, but then I notice Kyle is no longer holding me. He must be getting ready to push. I close my eyes and try to picture Lara’s face, then I hear something solid hitting metal.
“No!” Mitch roars. “No, this isn’t…” Then that noise again.
I turn, grabbing hold of the door frame to steady myself and see Kyle, his face contorted into what I imagine pure rage must look like. He has Mitch’s head in both of his hands. I can see the force he’s using to keep a hold of it. His muscles stand out from his arms, his fingers shake. Blood runs down Mitch’s face. His nose is bent, his lips smashed, his eyes darting around in terrified, angry confusion. Kyle roars as he uses the power of his entire body, pivoting from the hips, propelling Mitch’s head into the vestibule noticeboard, now smashed and sparking, for the third time. I feel a savage thrill when it makes contact.
Lara watches this happen, still terrified, but no longer sobbing. I make my way over to her and touch her good shoulder. She flinches and turns to face me, then wraps her good arm around me and won’t let go. I briefly consider sidling over to the door and closing it.
“It’s okay,” I whisper. “Everything’s okay.”
“No,” she whispers back, but that’s all she says.
Whatever Mitch is, whoever he is, and whatever he’s done, he can’t possibly be the balding old man he pretends to be. Maybe he was caught off-guard. Maybe he assumed whatever he’d done to Kyle would last longer. He must now understand his mistake. Moments before his head hits the noticeboard a fourth time, Kyle’s wild roar falters and falls silent. I watch, terrified all over again as Mitch pries Kyle’s fingers from his head as if they are nothing more troublesome than flies, dispersing as soon as they perceive movement. He then stands with such force, he sends Kyle sprawling to the floor just inside the open door.
“Kyle!” I
shout. Lara buries her head in my shoulder.
“Get out of here, Eden!” he shouts as Mitch moves almost supernaturally quickly, like stop-motion animation with frames missing, to where Kyle lays. Mitch puts his foot on Kyle’s face and presses down.
“Sweetie, I’m going to need you to let go for a minute, okay?” I whisper.
Reluctantly, Lara releases me from her grip, but surprises me by whirling around. In a second, she’s taken in the scene before her. She darts forward and lands a hard kick on the side of Mitch’s knee, the one supporting him as he crushes Kyle’s skull. He roars in pain and stumbles.
“Lara!” That was what I was going to do.
Kyle rises to his feet quickly and heads for Mitch, grabbing him by the shoulders. Mitch lands a punch on Kyle’s nose and Kyle responds in kind, devastating Mitch’s face further. The two men grapple with each other, punching where they can, kicking when their arms are otherwise engaged.
“Kyle! Be careful!” Lara shouts. They are so close to the door now.
Kyle turns around forcefully, bringing Mitch with him so that the older man’s back is to us. Kyle looks at each of us in turn, then smiles, his bloody teeth visible. He nods once. “Thank you both,” he says. “For believing me.”
My eyes almost pop clean out of my head. “Kyle! No!” It’s only six or seven feet. I start running.
I’m too late. Kyle sidesteps neatly out of the train, taking Mitch with him. I stop a foot inside the door and Lara arrives by my side a split second later. Mitch’s flailing hand, now no longer gripping Kyle, reappears from the gray and grabs Lara’s hair. She screams, and I immediately sink to a sitting position, bracing my foot against the door frame, pulling her down with me. She attempts to relieve the pulling at her scalp with her good arm and I loop one arm around her to stop her from being dragged away.